Category: News and Views
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Greetings fellow Bizarros:
Social scientists in Great Britain have uncovered a
dangerous trend in early childhood development. Racist
babies. Apparently it's true!
British parents might think their cute, pudgy, round-
cheeked little toddler is as innocent and full of wonder-
ment as the day is long, while secretly he or she could
very well be a hate-filled, miniature supremacist.
It's all thanks to the Race Relations Act that Parliament
passed in 2000. Under this act teachers are being forced to
report children as young as 3 years old to the authorities
for using alleged "racist" language.
And wouldn't you believe that since reporting began more
than a quarter million British children have been reported
to be racist! The hate in Great Britain is practically an
epidemic.
Munira Mirza, a senior adviser to London Mayor Boris Johnson,
said, "Teachers are now required to report incidents of
racist abuse among children as young as three to local
authorities, resulting in a massive increase of cases and
reinforcing the perception that we need an army of experts
to manage race relations from cradle to grave."
And if a forward, egalitarian and progressive-thinking
country like England is plagued with hate-filled racist
babies, how bad do you think the situation is here in the
United States?
Bizarrely,
Lewis
P.S. Now You Can Follow BIZARRE NEWS on TWITTER:
http://twitter.com/MyBizarreNews
This is truly sick. How is a three-year-old supposed to know if he/she is a racist and how can most of his/her words even be taken that seriously? Unless it's about abuse or something (and I mean provable abuse by an adult) what does it matter what names he/she calls his/her peers at that age? Sure, it's a good thing to advise him/her not to use them but it's not as if he/she is planning a secret Nazi cult or something. And to be honest, as Avenue Q says "everyone's a little bit racist sometimes". Just because a person doesn't like a given race or has reservations about a certain group of people it doesn't mean that he/she is ready to blast them with a machine gun, beat them to death, spray paint their door or even yell at them in the street. Whatever happened to personal preference? Is Bizarre News on Facebook? I love strange news articles!
Three? What the bloody hell?
If kids that young are using racist terms, they are only repeating what they hear at home. Maybe their parents should be the ones getting into trouble for being racists.
Yeah. Let's punish people for just using words without directly teaching hatred or involving themselves in violence, and in their homes no less. Perhaps, these children are hearing it outside of the home or on television. When I was a baby, I had ensomnia (I still do actually) and Mom didn't know that because she would be sleeping and I guess I was quiet. Anyway, it seems that Richard Prior would come on and I'd listen to him. One morning, when I was about two, I came down and very casually said "good morning motherfucker". Of course, I had no idea what I was saying and although Mom was shocked, she understood that fact. I, of course, don't remember anything of this at 26. So does that one incident mean that I hate my mother? Far from it! Have we devolved so far since 1985 that people can't realise that children mimic everything? Thankfully, some of you brought it up here or I'd start to wonder.
My Mimi's kind of like the Ella the helper movie in the movie Stephen King's "Monkey Shines". Anyone see that? Actor Jason Beghe played a young man who became a quadriplegic. He aquired a monkey that performed the functions of a guide dog, only for a quadriplegic. The monkey picked up on the character's dislikes mentally, then acted on them, killing his unfaithful girlfriend & the doctor who made a play for & got her. Finally the monkey turned on her owner. It was an '80's film, one of Mr King's better.
Anyway, when she was still 2 she picked up on my dislike for Arabic speaking immigrants up here. I was angry because while sitting with her waiting for my physical therapy appointment, I noticed in a beautiful book I had checked out for her in the library Arabic language graffiti on one of the colorful illustrations. The book was an English language vocabulary builder for a child. Had the graffiti been on the white part, I would have shut up & erased it with a pencil eraser, but it was put somewhere it was impossible to remove without ruining the illustration. I told my husband, her father, "Who do they think they are, writing on a book that isn't theirs?". The next day, I caught her in the living room tearing the book to shreds. While I say nothing about my dislike for them, we know people from her father's home country. When they ask, "So Mimi do you like Algeria?" she says "No". She told me once the milk there was horrible, & there's no way I would have told her that as I am not a milk drinker to know, but an older child who had also been there told her, & she repeated it. Or maybe she remembers it from before she was two. She would not drink it & grabbed the store brand milk we had in the fridge when we made the long trip home.
In short, kids pick up on their parents dislikes, just like the animal in the Stephen King movie. You don't have to come right out & say, "I don't like (whatever group)." I don't, put probably some of those parents in the English study do, as do some parents here. Seriously studying & prosecuting three year olds, though? Retarted retarded retarded...
Guys, the news story is satire.
hahaha, well, yeah, that's why I haven't heard of this riddiculous story and it would be considered overboard if not a satire, and we have gone overboard many a times not just in stories. I mean you see this all over, go outside, sit and watch.
Apologies for busting your illusions over the truthfulness of this story margorp and Rachel, but it is indeed quite true.
Here's the Daily Mail article on the story.
As for what I say on the matter LibraLady pretty much already covered that. Kids at that age clearly aren't old enough to have developed into full-blown racists, but it does demonstrate exactly what kind of attitudes they are exposed to in their homes and that is a worry because children are highly impressionable and are very likely to develop similar prejudices as they grow older.
While I do agree with the general sentiment that this piece of legislation has taken things too far, whether that was an intended consequence or not, it has never the less highlighted a worrying trend because with Europe's internal borders ever more open, things are only going to get worse as greater numbers immigrate to the United Kingdom, and of course it's the next generation of children that are going to be faced with this ever growing influx of people.
I could say a whole lot more on this subject but I'll not because frankly, the topic of racism just depresses me so much.
Dan.
Uggg really... wow...